


Basic Chemistry

by edibleflowers



Category: The Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-09
Updated: 2012-09-09
Packaged: 2017-11-13 20:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edibleflowers/pseuds/edibleflowers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orlando doesn't know how to make a cake but he figures it can't really be that hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Basic Chemistry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lemniskate67](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemniskate67/gifts).



> This is PG fluff-o-rama. For lemniskate, who deserves many lovely things for her birthday, but sadly the best I can do is to expand the fandoms in which I have actively written yet again for her. (Why does that keep happening, by the way?)
> 
> I swore I would never write (or read) LOTRPS, and yet here it is. Sob. Originally posted on January 4, 2009, on my Livejournal.

Orlando doesn't know how to make a cake but he figures it can't really be that hard. People do it all the time, right? And just because he wants to make it from scratch shouldn't complicate matters that much: again, people, all the time, etc. He skips the boxes of pre-sifted mix in the baking aisle at the grocery and picks out what seem like the appropriate ingredients. Eggs, oil, flour, milk. Sugar, right? He thinks so. He doesn't keep a lot of food on hand at the house; he doesn't eat there very much. If he's forgotten something, he can ring Liv and ask her, but he's pretty sure he can handle this. Of course he can. It's just a cake.

When he gets back to the house (he always thinks of it as "the house", or sometimes "the rental"; though he's been there for a year now, it's not home, home is still his mum's house) he dumps it all out on the kitchen counter and then goes to the laptop to look up a recipe. The sheer volume of cooking sites intimidated him the other day, but he's narrowed it down now to one site that includes lots of good clear pictures. Which is good, because he needs the visual prompts. He figures a simple chocolate cake will be good; he has a pan and he bought frosting, so really there's not much that can go wrong, right?

OK, so he makes a mistake rinsing out the measuring cup after the flour and not letting it dry before he measures the sugar, so the measurement's probably not entirely accurate from sugar sticking to the cup, but a teaspoon more or less can't make that much of a difference, right? And the mixer, well, he does have batter all over the place for a couple seconds -- including what _was_ his clean white t-shirt -- but the majority of it stays in the bowl, so that's all right. He should have let the butter warm and soften first, clearly, but surely it'll melt in the oven. And he doesn't have any vanilla, but it only asked for a teaspoon anyway so it can't make that much of a difference and it's supposed to be a chocolate cake so who cares.

Once it's all mixed (he's lost when the recipe talks about sifting, but he just runs the mixer a lot and hopes that counts for it) he pours it into the pan, then curses when he realizes that he hasn't pre-heated the oven. Whatever that means. He turns it on and gives it about ten minutes to heat up, which he hopes is sufficient, and then puts the pan in and sets the timer.

He's anxiously poking around on the cooking site, half-reading about baking tips, one eye always on the oven. It doesn't smoke ominously, nor does the alarm go off, so the cake must be all right so far. When the timer beeps, he practically leaps from the chair to go get it from the oven; he forgets a hotpad and just reaches in to grab the pan, but the prohibitive heat stops him before he actually touches it. He hisses as he grabs a towel and carefully lifts the pan out of the oven, dropping it on top. The cake doesn't look as pretty as the pictures on the website; it seems misshapen and sad, lumpy on one side, a bit sunken on the other. But it smells good, and Orlando eagerly sets in to frosting it.

That turns out to be a bad idea, too. Once he's done -- and it's nowhere near as smooth as it ought to look, sort of messily puckered wherever he'd lift up the knife -- it's already begun to melt from the heat of the cake. He shakes his head ruefully and moves the pan to the counter to let it cool, as he should have done first.

"What in the world is all this?"

Orlando jerks and drops the pan the last inch to the counter. He swallows hard, glancing around at the mess. Droplets of cake batter decorate a kitchen wall as well as the shirt he hasn't changed out of yet. The bowl he mixed the batter in sits in the sink with the beaters still dropped in it, yet to be washed; the counter has been strewn with drifts of flour and sugar, and leftover trails of egg yolk lead his eye to the edge of the sink where he left the eggshells. The frosting container stands open, the knife sticking out of it, his chocolate-dipped fingers testifying to the messiness of his decorating efforts. Orlando bites his lip and looks up at his visitor.

Viggo smiles his slow smile and drops his wallet on the kitchen table. His shoes are by the door where he's just stepped out of them; his eyes take in the disaster of the kitchen before coming to rest on Orlando in the middle of it, and one eyebrow rises.

Sheepishly, Orlando gestures toward the cake. "You're a bit early. It was supposed to cool first. But, uh." And he lifts it up by one edge so that Viggo can see the writing in white icing -- spreading and melting over the chocolate frosting, but still legible: 'Happy Birthday Viggo!!' "It's for you," he adds, as if further explanation were necessary at this stage.

Viggo says nothing for a moment, but his smile begins to stretch. It's such a relief that Orlando puts a hand on the counter to keep from sagging. "I know I made a mess," Orlando says, "and it doesn't look right and the frosting's all melted--"

Fortunately, Viggo cuts him off then with a kiss. By the end of it, Orlando's forgotten the cake entirely; he's panting, and it takes him a second to recall his name. Viggo's hands slip from his face to rest on his hips, and Orlando sighs and lets himself lean into Viggo.

"Happy birthday, love," he murmurs.

"You are the sweetest thing," Viggo says with a grin, and Orlando finds, after six months, that he still has the capability to blush.


End file.
